Power, corruption, extremism: these are his subjects.

Meanwhile, the series director, Peter Kosminsky, is best known for his political dramas ( The Project, The Government Inspector, Britz). Although Peter Straughan, the writer of the series, received an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, his background is in theatre and he has all the skills needed to deal with such courtly, interior material. In this instance, it’s all about casting. This was certainly the case with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s spiffing stage productions and it is also true of the BBC’s adaptation (Wednesdays, 9pm), which puts a new spin – I use the word deliberately – on Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power. Original black cloth, gilt lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket, promotional material for the stage play loosely inserted.It’s hard to tire of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, when they keep being reinvented.

A truly engaging authorial commentary on a major historical novel. Her notes are also acutely personal, offering a striking sense of the author’s profound emotional attachment to the stories being told and her absolute immersion into the lives of her characters. On Henry VIII, for instance, she writes: ‘I don’t think he is a monster but there is no type of man (or woman) who is suited to the exercise of absolute power’. They show a deep concern for accuracy and historical truth and a desire to put the humanity of her characters at the very centre of her literary project. Mantel’s annotations are a masterful study in the historical novelist’s art, providing insights into the interpretation of primary sources and the myths and legends surrounding her central characters. The Royal Shakespeare Company produced a two-part adaption of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies in 2014, and in 2015 a six-part television series was broadcast by the BBC. Bring Up the Bodies is the second work in a celebrated trilogy of historical novels – following Wolf Hall (2009) and preceding The Mirror & the Light (2020) – which chart the experiences of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII. London: Fourth Estate, 2012.įirst edition of the Booker Prize-winning novel, signed and abundantly annotated by the author with 4753 words of commentary across 179 pages.

Bring up the bodies bbc